Oil Pastel

N finished her oil pastel class this week. She finally finished her Lily and I think it looks wonderful though she says it looks horrible. But now that she knows the basic technique, I told her she can pretty much make a lot of other things. She wants to take the Jaguar one but I feel uncomfortable because it’s something animate. I feel bad enough that I’m letting them draw animate beings for the comic, but I take that as for educational purposes.

The previous week they didn’t finish the leaves, so this week was finishing up the leaves and the background

With art classes, I stick to inanimate beings. I just want her to learn the techniques and then apply it halal-ly inshaAllah.

She also did her live presentation online in her Mammals class. I didn’t see it of course, as she locked herself up in her room when she did her presentation but I asked her about it afterwards. She said her teacher said she seems to know a lot about cats, and that the students love her powerpoint presentation and wants to ‘steal’ it. She seems happy enough about her presentation. I’m happy that she did it and prepared for it and did a wonderful job on it mashaAllah.

For her live presentation, she showed a video of her topic of choice (cats). This video was taken years back at DDR, when the girls volunteered with training animals at the animal shelter to be friendly with people before they are offered up for adoption.

N is taking Oil Pastel class on Currclick and it started this morning. We had gone to Hobby Lobby yesterday on the way back from the library to get her materials. She didn’t really prepare as she should ahead of class and by the time I was done with my class, she had started her class and then told me she needs a printout. Well, she was a bit left behind but we figure it out and by the end of class she was pretty caught up, alhamdulillah.

They did a Lily.

She likes the class, so I asked her if she wants to take another of those classes. I was looking through Currclick for more classes and figured I’ll wait till they put up new classes.

So far so good.

H also started his Magnetism class today. He committed a major boo boo for which I was really angry about. I hope he doesn’t do that anymore. But he also likes Science Jim, the instructor. He actually said,

“Actually he’s a pretty good teacher.”

So I am thinking of having him take all of Science Jim’s classes in Physics and that they would hopefully give him a good grounding for high school Physics. At least he’d be interested.

I’ve also been looking at Kitchen Chemistry for N’s high school. When I googled it I landed on The Well-Trained Mind forums, which has really been a big help to me in figuring out how to homeschool high school.

I found this Kitchen Chemistry resource which is really interesting. And of course there is MIT’s OpenCourseWare Kitchen Chemistry. So we’ll see. This time, since my course will inshaAllah end Feb of next year, I look forward to have more time to spend planning out their courses and focusing on homeschooling more, without being pulled at from many different sources. As I say this, I am thinking to myself,

I’m sure I will still be as busy if not more, if I am still alive that is.

One of the desktops at home. N in her Oil Pastel class

On the other desktop in the house, S in her TQ class, having a break so I took over this computer during her 1 hour break